What would you do with a surplus Apollo Guidance Computer, a true gem of the space age? Here is one man’s quest to revive one such piece of space race history…with a lot of help from like-minded friends.

Martin J. Lollar, P.E.

IN JIMMIE LOOCKE’S GARAGE

During December 2018 in a moderately sized hotel room in Humble, Texas, an Apollo Guidance Computer did what it was designed to do and executed approximately 2,000 instructions without errors. This 50-year-old piece of highly sophisticated and revolutionary 1960s vintage technology functioned perfectly using mostly original parts.

The small group in attendance marveled at the readings on a data scope, and stared in wonder at the result of months of research, detailed hand-tracing of old circuitry, and boundless hard work. The computer was alive and well.

So how did a critical piece of Apollo hardware, without which we never would have landed men on the Moon, end up in a hotel room surrounded by an expert technical team striving to resurrect it? The answer isn’t simple but it is quite a tale, focused on one person: a sixth-generation Texan named Jimmie Wayne Loocke.

For those who might not be familiar with the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) and exactly where it fit in the scheme of NASA’s Moon landing effort, a short history is in order. In any form of travel, the most important point in getting from one place to another is navigation. Today we take this for granted, using GPS satellites to give us our position to within a few inches. But the Apollo program began in the early 1960s, and the place we were headed to was 240,000 miles (386,243 kilometers) away in deep space. The astronauts had to know exactly where they were at any given time during the voyage and also be able to select a target and fly precisely to it in three-dimensional space. For this to occur, a robust and foolproof computer would be needed—one small enough to fit inside a cramped spacecraft.